Someone Else
by ClaraBecket
Summary: VERY AU. Roughly attempts to follow the movieverse plot, but with a very, very, very different Evey and several floating corpses in the Thames.


"Need a hand, Doc?"

Leaning down and stretching one arm behind her to grab the shoulder-strap of her BCD, she nodded. "Please." The man behind her leaned down easily despite the burden of his own tank and BC ensemble, and lifted her vest into position until she slipped her arms under the shoulder straps and shrugged the weight of it onto her own shoulders, hands fastening, tightening, and checking straps with the ease of a routine so practiced and so vital it had become almost ritual. "Thanks, Bill." The steel air tank strapped to the back of the vest lay heavily against her spine, its weight making her cumbersome as she carefully bent down to scoop up the neon-yellow fins and mask from where they lay on the damp gravel of the bank.

The weight was comforting, despite its awkwardness, a familiar and reassuring constant that bolstered her against the cold darkness she prepared to enter and the horrors she sought there.

"No problem," Bill replied, resting a neoprene-gloved hand on her shoulder for balance as he tugged his own fins onto his feet and tugged the straps tight. Evey took the weight clumsily but solidly, then went through the clumsy ritual herself, leaned down and standing on one foot with the weight of her tank on her back as Bill returned the favor. Straightening, she looked around to see the other three teams in similar states of preparation and the safety diver already seated on the edge of the boat drifting a few feet off the muddy gravel bank.

The edge of the Thames estuary offered a bleak scene even to Evey's jaded eyes, gray sky above gray-brown water, with mottled gray-and-black city spreading out from the shoreline between. Only the occasional splash of color from a piece of dive equipment and the flashing lights of assorted emergency vehicles, one of them Evey Hammond's own, broke the grayness. She could hardly call the splashes of brightness cheerful.

"You don't have to do this, you know," Bill remarked from beside her, frowning at the distant look on her face. "It's screwing the hell out of protocol with you technically being a civilian, and you've got nothing left to prove, not to any of us."

"I _enjoy_ screwing the hell out of protocol," she retorted, her solemnity flashing into a grin in an instant. "Show me someone in this city with enough balls to throw an ME off her own scene. And I'm at training as regularly as any of you coppers."

Bill feigned indignance. "Crazy girl. Let's get wet, shall we?"

They backed toward the water's edge, fins shuffling across the ground, bright yellow against the gray mud and gray gravel. Evey tried, and failed, to remember colors besides gray.

"Yeep!" she squealed as her feet hit the frigid November water and the cold pierced through Evey's seven millimeters of neoprene.

"What was that?" Bill asked, casting a sidelong smirk at his partner.

"I said, 'I am a fearless badass and Bill Dunham better watch his mouth,' but you must've not been listening properly," she replied through gritted teeth as she forced herself farther in.

"Ah, that's what I thought," the older man replied with a chuckle and a shake of his head. "Wouldn't have that trouble if you'd give and get yourself a drysuit."

"Can't afford one," she half-snarled the words, more at the biting cold clawing her legs than at her partner. "Some of us don't get department-issue."

"What, the ME's Office doesn't provide dive gear? Good for them, it would only encourage you," he retorted with his usual infuriating good humor.

"Shove off, Bill."

He laughed outright at that, reaching a gloved hand into the water to splash an icy handful at her. She squeaked and stumbled backward, cursing through a suddenly clenched jaw as she realized her stumble had carried her deeper into the cold water of the Thames.

"Quit stalling, girl," Bill prompted, grinning.

"Right, then, here goes." She closed her mouth around her regulator, drawing in a couple of breaths before pulling her mask over her eyes and plunging forward into the estuary. Gray water surrounded her, the cold clawing at her so painfully that she dropped her regulator and shouted "Bloody hell!" before she consciously considered the action.

Replacing her regulator after evicting a stream of frigid muddy-gray water through the purge valve, she descended, glancing sideways to flash an "OK" sign at the blurry dark shape that was Bill descending beside her. She made out his answering "OK" in the murky darkness, nodded, and unstrapped her compass from her wrist to take a bearing. The small quivering needle would be her only guide in this featureless void, her partner her only living companion. The dead, however, would be all around them.

"_How many?" she had mumbled groggily into the phone receiver, flinging the question up as a shield to buy her sleep-addled mind enough time to flounder its way into consciousness and process the situation. Details slowly clicked into place. The blurry red shapes glowing from the face of the bedside alarm clock resolved themselves into a digital rendition of "4:08" with enough squinting, and the persistent sound in her ear was Eric's voice, sounding very awake and tinged with alarm. Eric's tone finally jolted her out of sleep, and she lost his answer amid her fumbling to turn the phone receiver right side up. "Say again?"_

"_At least a dozen," Eric had replied, then politely pretended not to hear the curse on the other end of the phone. "And here's the clencher. Report came in about half an hour ago, and we've been trying ever since to get a trace. No luck." Knowing Eric as she did after six years of horrible scenes and late-night calls such as this, she heard the unspoken curse in his words and silently seconded it. "This doesn't bode well at all."_

_Evey's mind raced, dancing nimbly along the edge of the line between panic and fast thinking, and at last she inquired, in a tone that carried the firmness that comes with acting on a decision, "Are any other agencies involved?" As with the cursing, they both knew without speaking it that she referred to Creedy and his men. _

"_No, Ma'am," he had replied, sounding buoyed by her sudden control, and the change had made her smile slightly, partly in relief and partly in amazement at the simple power that lay in the ability to not panic._

"_Good, Inspector Finch." She would never have addressed him so formally in person; off the record they had been Eric and Evey to each other for years now, ever since that first case with the car and the shovel and the millions of flies. But this conversation would be reviewed later, unavoidably. "Keep it that way. I don't want the public getting wind of this before it's been properly assessed." _Or anyone else_, she had added silently to herself, shaking her head at both the seditious thought and its necessity._

"_That's clear, Dr. Hammond. Shall I call up the Marine Unit?"_

"_No, Inspector, that's all right," she had replied, sensing that he'd seen her answer coming anyway. He ought to have done, by now. "I'll see to it. I rather expect I'll be going with them."_

_Eric had allowed himself to breach protocol then. _"_Be safe, Evey."_

A deliberate kick of her finned feet sent her surging forward into the cold gray darkness.

- - -

With a sigh, Inspector Eric Finch reached up and hit the switch on his dashboard, silencing the siren that had heralded his late arrival to the grim gathering on the banks of the Thames. The red and blue lights died with the siren, and Eric allowed himself a shake of his head and a moment's cynicism. "Not like we need another bloody set of lights around here," he remarked wryly to the silent interior of his car. Off to the right, the ME van's set was whirling and flashing as though competing with those atop the dive truck and the small handful of POV's, clustered around the larger vehicles like hyenas waiting for the lions to eat their fill.

Pulling his trenchcoat more tightly about himself against the biting chill of the November wind, Eric stepped from the car. From here he could see the row of black body bags, gleaming and wet, lined up at the water's edge. Two of the ME's assistants, the ones Evey called her field crew, finished their work at the last one and stood, looking thoroughly rattled. The divers stood together off to the edge of the scene in a little knot of neoprene, the water still lapping at their feet. As Eric approached, the last pair emerged from the river, preceded by the orange bulge of a lift bag breaking the murky surface, its brightness stark against the gray. Evey and Bill rose and shuffled ashore, and Eric choked back a silent sob of horror at the sad little bundle in Evey's arms. Despite the bloating, the body she cradled so gingerly had inescapably once been a child.

Over its head, perhaps merciful in its concealment of the ravaged, swollen features, was a chillingly familiar black bag.

In a sudden flurry of movement, the rest of the dive team moved to Evey, taking the victim from her suddenly limp arms and helping her and Bill out of their BCDs. In her black hooded wetsuit, she looked like a sleeker, more streamlined version of Death save that her right hand held the limp orange form of a lift bag rather than the cold steel of a scythe. The lift bag fell from her hand to wallow in the muddy water like a dead thing itself, and she simply watched it for a long moment. At a soft word from her partner, her head snapped up, and the eyes that settled on Eric were cold and full of grief. Wordlessly she shook her head, and he nodded to her silent request for a moment.

As he watched, the Angel of Death shoved back her hood, fell to her knees in the mud, and wept.


End file.
